A Rhinestone Button

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Gail Anderson-Dargatz's third novel recasts the Biblical story of Job in Alberta farm country. Fans of her earlier fiction will relish the familiar mix of ingredients in <i>A Rhinestone Button</i>: the isolated rural upbringing of its main character, the wealth of farming lore, and the lush descriptions of the natural world. Like Beth Weeks (the hero of Anderson-Dargatz's award-winning novel <i>The Cure for Death by Lightning</i>), Job Sunstrum experiences a deep psychic connection to his landscape. The shy young cattle farmer is blessed with the gift of synesthesia: he can see and even feel sound. For Job, the whirling hum of a vacuum cleaner is "an invisible egg with the smooth, cool feel of glass." Too "pretty" to be fully accepted by the ordinary folk of Godsfinger, Job appears content to linger on the fringes of his community, farming the land his abusive father left him, baking his famous almond squares, and communing with the vacuum. <p> The collapse of Job's tidy world is presaged by the unexpected return home of his brother Jacob, an out-of-work pastor with a sour wife and a troubled son. Suddenly, he's not only banished from his beloved kitchen but struggling to figure out his relationship with everyone from his childhood playmate Will to the attractive waitress at the local café. What Job needs (as even the local nutcase keeps telling him) is a woman. What the sexually confused virgin finds instead is born-again religion in the form of Jacob's charismatic preacher friend, Jack Divine. </p><p> Anderson-Dargatz's account of Job's initiation into Pentecostalism is as fascinating as it is funny. Scenes such as Job's inane attempt to speak in tongues and Father Divine's outing of a young gay man have a quirky honesty that make for compelling reading. The novel as a whole, however, suffers from choppy narrative transitions and a certain vacuousness that seems to be an extension of Job's limitations as a character. Angelic though he is, Job is just a little too dim to really care about. <i>--Lisa Alward</i></p>